5 ms·

I've always wondered how someone born blind is able to wrap their mind around the concept of color. It appears you've done so -- how would you describe color?

• Chinjut 12y ago
  Why should the concept of color be harder to wrap one's mind around or describe than the concept of sight itself? Or, considering any animal with any kind of sensory receptors other than those you yourself have, wrapping your mind around or describing the concept of the data produced by such receptors? [A bat's echolocatory sense, say, or magnetoception...] ["Oh, it's easy to understand the PHYSICS and BIOLOGY of color, but can the blind really comprehend the EXPERIENCE of color?", some might say. Alright, fine, shades of "What Mary Didn't Know", but I'm not keen to get into that.]
  • hentrep 12y ago
    I suppose what I was getting at is this: How do you explain what color is to a natively-blind person in a non-mathematical, non-physics based approach? In other words, the way most of the world learns about color (qualitatively). You can't use words like "shade" or "hue", because the very definition of those words are themselves tied to color. For example, attempt to describe a baseball. Descriptions invoking roundness and texture can be easily understood because the individual retains his/her sense of feel. But saying "it's white in color... white is actually the presence of all colors..." obviously doesn't work. I'd be curious to hear an example of how you would explain color to someone who has been blind for life.
    • dandelany 12y ago
      I've thought about this before, and concluded that the best analogy to draw would likely be that of sound pitch or timbre. When a sound is close to you, it seems louder. When it's far away, it seems quieter. But sounds have other qualities which are perceived the same regardless of distance - pitch being the most recognizable. And a sound's pitch changes how you perceive it unconsciously - that is, there is a "qualia" to hearing a low sound vs. a high sound that cannot really be explained. Similarly, visible objects which are close appear larger and those far away appear smaller. But visible objects have other qualities which are perceived the same regardless of distance - namely color. And an object's color also has a certain "qualia" that unconsciously affects how you feel about it. This has the added advantage of making it easy to explain Doppler shift vs. redshift :)
    • LeoPanthera 12y ago
      Assuming they can still hear, I would probably try to explain the colour of light to be analogous to the pitch of sound.
    • aliakbarkhan 12y ago
      Try looking into qualia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
    • jimmaswell 12y ago
      This was touched on in The Giver, interestingly. The main character becomes able to see color after never having been able to.
    • Rapzid 12y ago
      Perhaps it's as good a place as any to make a scientific explanation but... I can see, hear, and understand the science behind light and sound. But as I sit here and think about it there is no link in my mind between the science of light and the EXPERIENCE of perceiving a color :|
• jareds 12y ago
  I don’t have any meaningful concept of color. I do have some light perception so assume that white is what I see if you shine a light in my eye, black is what I see when all the lights are turned off and gray is the middle ground when there are some lights turned on but not enough for the light to actually be painful. Intellectually I realize there are other colors but the only way I can explain them is in reference to objects. Grass is green, the ocean is blue, etc. I realize that this is meaningless since I don’t have a frame of reference to compare the ocean to grass from a visual perspective.
  • lisper 12y ago
    If you have some light perception, what happens if you shine different colors of light in your eye?
    • jareds 12y ago
      Nothing, it looks the same to me.
      • Rapzid 12y ago
        I suppose it is possible you're perceiving the light as a particular color, but if you can only perceive that color you would mistaken it for white?
        • gohrt 12y ago
          I don't know what jareds's situation is, but normal humans have light sensors that are not color sensors, and also have color sensors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoreceptor_cell
• marcosscriven 12y ago
  This reminds me of musicians, particularly those with perfect pitch, who talk of 'colours' of keys. While it's not a direct analogy, perhaps one way to think of colour, if you've never seen it before, is to think of different wavelengths of sounds being a bit like different wavelengths of light.
• furyofantares 12y ago
  I imagine a blind person can study light just as well as anyone else, and can learn about the eye and can understand that sighted people are able to detect both wavelength and intensity differences. Just like a deaf person could learn about pressure waves in the air and how they can be detected by functional ears. But it's probably difficult or impossible to understand what the perception is like, and how rich it is, except by analogy when thinking about how they'd try to describe the senses the do have to someone that doesn't have them. Our understanding of echolocation in bats or the magnetic field in birds is probably similar. We understand what they detect and how they detect it. But I don't think we have any understanding of what it's like to experience that perception.
  • jes5199 12y ago
    There's a classic essay by Thomas Nagel that makes this exact point in great detail: "What is it like to be a bat" http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf